community and civic engagement

First, the community partnership with a local non-profit organization might have worked better in a research methods course. Because I structure my courses around daily reading and writing assignments, they are effectively hybrid in design. Initial encounters with and applications of knowledge happen outside the classroom. This makes it easier for to cut content from a course if needed, and in a community partnership, something planned before the semester begins always needs to be abandoned midstream.

As I mentioned in Part 4 and Part 5 of this series, this time around the ethnography assignment was what got left by the side of the road. But my decision was driven by the lack of quality data gathered by students, not because the time that students spent working on behalf of the community partner was greater than expected. I knew going into the course that I would not be creating a bunch of Margaret Meads, but the classroom instruction on field interviewing did not produce the level of proficiency necessary to complete an assignment that students had never before encountered.

A lack of facility in working with data also showed up in the infographic assignments that replaced the ethnography. Students’ infographics included percentages calculated from the data they had collected, but the percentages often did not reflect informative observations about local patterns of food consumption.

Though this course was 100-level, the students in it ranged from first-year to seniors. So the lessons here for me are, first, that I should not assume that the students who enroll in this course have any prior training in working with data, and second, that a project of this nature requires a full semester devoted to teaching research skills, not a brief introduction to it wedged into a course whose focus is on acquiring topical knowledge. In sum, I tried to do too much within the confines of a single course.

Second, if I think students should gain a better understanding of community, I need to do a better job of getting them to define and work with the concept. The maps of the local community that students drew at the end of the semester did not vary much from the maps they drew at the beginning, and their discussion of community in the end-of-semester meta-cognitive assignment was often unfocused. To be fair, I now think the prompt I created for the assignment was itself needlessly complex — one of my bad habits.

So, as usual, when I teach this course again next year, it will be back to the drawing board for more changes.

As I mentioned in my last post about changes to my globalization course, my original plan of assigning an ethnography in conjunction with a project for a community partner no longer seemed likely to serve its intended purpose, so I removed it mid-semester. As a replacement, I have assigned students the task of creating infographics, first individually, and then in teams of four. I will turn over the latter products to the community partner as one of the deliverables from the project. Directions for the individual assignment are as follows: Continue reading →

The semester is half over, and it has become apparent that I need to make some on-the-spot changes to my globalization course. The first change is quite minor: students have added or dropped the course, necessitating an edit to my Canvas LMS survey for the Project Contribution Award. As I mentioned previously, the mechanics of this procedure would be extremely time-consuming with a large class.

The second change is much more . . . extensive. As part of a foundation grant, the class is formally partnered with a local non-profit organization, Aquidneck Community Table (ACT). Students are collecting and analyzing data on the food consumption patterns of local residents by means of face-to-face interviews and supermarket receipts. Course assignments related to this project include a food ethnography and a single class-wide report for ACT.

The food ethnography is essentially the same as the ethnography of consumption that I have used in past iterations of the course (discussed here and in the bullet points here). My instructions for the ethnography this semester: Continue reading →

As I wrote back in December, I decided to continue using the Quality of Failure essay as a final meta-cognitive reflection. But given the course’s emphasis on community engagement this semester, I thought I should modify the assignment a bit, in part by tying it to a classroom activity: map-making. A few weeks ago I had each student draw a map of the local community — the place where most live for eight semesters prior to graduation. The purpose of this exercise was to make them aware of the fact that their knowledge of the people who live nearby — their neighbors, in a sense — is quite limited. After some discussion, I collected the maps. Toward the end of the course, I will have students draw the same map, then return the first version so they can see how their thinking has changed. I hope this process will generate some awareness about how the meaning of “community” can differ, even among people living in close proximity to one another.

As I mentioned last week, students in my globalization course are partnering with a local non-profit organization. The impetus for this partnership is a foundation grant on civic engagement, and I’m one of the members of the faculty learning community that has been created as part of the project. Student behavior has been a topic of discussion within this group. Treating others with civility, empathy, and understanding should be the norm in the classroom, especially in one where students are expected to collaborate with each other in teams. These behaviors become even more important when students are interacting with the general public as part of a course. So I created an exercise for the first day of class that was inspired by the practices of a few of my colleagues.

Happy holidays, everyone. Today’s post is another look back at my fall semester, thinking about what to abandon, begin, and continue doing for the spring. I’ve got two ideas for “begin,” one very simple and much more complex.

First, I have begun entering the classroom with my mobile phone on, ringer silenced. I discovered during the incident a few months ago that it is highly inconvenient waiting for one’s phone to boot up when one wants to call campus police. Before this happened I left my phone in my office most of the time. Not anymore.

Second, my spring semester course on globalization promises to be radically different from anything I have done before. The class will be collecting data in the field about local food consumption as part of a community engagement project. The project will entail splitting students into teams to tackle different tasks, so they won’t be marching in lock step through the semester, all doing the exact same things at the exact same time. One can never predict how well this arrangement will work — there is a much higher potential for the wheels to come off the bus.

Another new aspect involves interacting with students in two other courses, in an arrangement I now refer to as a pod. My students will supply spatial data on where people get the food they eat to students taking a geographic information systems course. And my class will be interviewing students in a sculpture course about how their work allows them to understand the concepts of place and making — which relate to the globalization of production and consumption that my students will be learning about. I and the two other faculty members in the pod managed to get our courses scheduled into the same time blocks, a piece of logistical jiu jitsu that will facilitate a type of student-student interaction across classes that I have never formally encouraged before. Since this is all part of a much grander experiment, I will be posting regular updates about the pod next semester.

Randy Stoecker, professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, will present “Hip Hop, Campus-Community Collaboration and the Old White Guy Professor” on Wednesday, October 18, 7:30 – 9:00 p.m., at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, USA. If you’re in the area, you can register for this free event here.

Stoecker is the author of Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement (2016, Temple University Press). He argues in this book that the dominant paradigm of service learning in higher education — which nominally emphasizes experiential learning a la John Dewey — in reality prioritizes institutions. It is operationalized as the number of hours students spend in a community setting, which is treated as an object to be acted upon in the service of university-defined student needs. This practice introduces a logical inconsistency in regards to civic engagement, which he explains with an example of a sociology course in which students are supposed to learn about poverty and social inequality by volunteering at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter:

[The student’s] experience is actually the indirect experience of someone else’s experience. That is, the student does something for someone else who is actually experiencing poverty. The student does not directly experience poverty—they only experience what it is like to be a volunteer doing things for someone experiencing poverty. Thus, the best-fit learning goal is not an understanding of poverty, but an understanding of poverty service provision (p. 35).

Course projects based upon an institutionalized service learning pedagogy thus can reinforce students’ perceptions that marginalized communities are helpless, part of the “white-savior industrial complex.”* Neither students nor the communities they interact with acquire an increased capacity to attack through political means the causes of problems from which communities suffer.

Stoecker argues that student-community partnerships should empower communities to produce positive social change. In this perspective, the proper role of students, faculty, and higher education writ large is to support communities in these efforts, with curriculum-based student learning outcomes being of only secondary importance. It’s an interesting perspective, one that I think it has a lot of merit given given my own experience with community partnerships intended to produce civic engagement.**

Today we have a guest post from Titus Alexander, founder of Democracy Matters. He can be reached at titus [at] democracymatters [dot] info.

Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of nationalism in China, India, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, and many European states, are seismic events in world politics. They have revealed deep divisions in our societies and chart radically different pathways for our future. They also serve as a wake-up call for educational institutions to play a more active role in strengthening democracy. To do this, political education needs to fulfil three key tasks:

Experts do get it wrong. They disagree. They debate facts and what they mean. But the fundamental principle of honest inquiry is as important in politics as it is to physics. Researchers must challenge ‘post-truth’ politics to ensure that public debate is grounded in evidence. Continue reading →

Here is the third installment of L. Dee Fink’s course design method. In this post I will be looking at final details.

How am I going to grade?

I am going to jump to a 2,000 point scale for calculating course grades, partly because of a new rubric for reading responses. I will also need to build rubrics for the activities related to game design. I will let students evaluate each other’s collaborative skills through the usual teammate evaluations.

By looking back at the primary components that I identified in Part 1, I can see that I forgot about the need to assess the civic engagement project. In the USA, most students won’t care about or complete tasks that are not graded. Continue reading →

Here is the second installment of using L. Dee Fink’s method of course design. In the first installment, I ran through the first phase of the process, identifying primary components. Now I’ll be assembling those components into a coherent whole by aligning the course’s schedule and topics with what students will be doing.